By way of background concerning some conventional systems, it is noted that computing devices have traditionally stored information and associated applications. To these and related ends, it is further noted that implementing an efficient memory management scheme can help to achieve optimal computing performance. Developments in automatic memory management schemes have been performed well over manual memory management schemes. Garbage collector algorithms, for instance, are automatic memory management schemes, which attempt to reclaim memory occupied by objects that are no longer in use by a particular program.
Tracing garbage collectors are a common type of garbage collector. Tracing garbage collectors first determine which objects are reachable (or potentially reachable), and then discard all remaining objects. A reachable object can be defined as an object for which there exists some variable in the program environment that lead to it, either directly or through reference from other reachable objects. More precisely, objects are generally reachable in two ways. First, a distinguished set of objects, known as roots, are assumed to be reachable. Typically, these include all objects referenced from anywhere in the call stack (that is, all local variables and parameters in the functions currently being invoked), and any global variables. Second, anything referenced from a reachable object is itself deemed reachable. A complication with conventional garbage collectors, however, is that garbage collectors need to quickly and efficiently free memory allocated to objects that are no longer reachable.
The above-described deficiencies of today's memory management schemes are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.